The Chinese government will increasingly cooperate with international organizations to help improve its occupational health and safety standards, said Wang Xianzheng, deputy director of the State Administration of Work Safety (SAWS), the country's work safety watchdog.

"China will develop better policies, increase supervision, make risk evaluation and education and training," he said at a meeting marking the World Day for Safety and Health at Work, which falls on Saturday.

In January, China became a signatory to the International Labor Organization's (ILO) convention on occupational health and safety.

"Joining the convention will profoundly enhance China's development of work safety and occupational health," said Wang adding the country would increase cooperation and exchanges with the ILO and other international organizations.

While China's economy has been booming with double-digit growth for years, it has come at the cost of the health and lives of many workers.

On average, 17 miners lose their lives everyday in Chinese coalmines, which are the world's deadliest. In 2005, the death rate in China's coal mines was 2.81 for every million tons of coal mined, 70 times worse than the rate in the United States and seven times higher than that in Russia and India.

SAWS's figures show that coal mine accidents killed 4,746 people in China in 2006.

China has established plans to close more small coal mines, upgrade coal mining technologies, conduct more safety checks and provide miners with safety training to curb accidents.

Accidents are not the only risk workers face. Occupational diseases, especially lung diseases, are also killers. Apart from mining, leather-making, construction and chemical production are other dangerous sectors where the rate of occupational disease is high.

In April 2005, an MOH official said more than 16 million companies in China had dangerous or poisonous work environments that put more than 200 million Chinese workers at risk.

The occupational disease situation was described as "grim" by the Ministry of Health (MOH) in a report to the National People's Congress (NPC) this year.

Even though China implemented an occupational diseases prevention law in May 2002, many firms, which are often located in small towns, are still turning a blind eye to the health and safety of their workers.

The report predicted that the number of workers afflicted with occupational diseases in China will continue to increase over the next 10 to 15 years before work safety measures begin to truly take effect.

The NPC said it will investigate exactly how the law on the prevention of occupational diseases is being implemented by local governments.

(Xinhua News Agency April 29, 2007)